Chemical sensors offer opportunities for improving personal security, safety, and health. To enable broad adoption of chemical sensors requires performance and cost advantages that are best realized from innovations in the design of the sensing (transduction) materials. Ideal materials are sensitive and selective to specific chemicals or chemical classes and provide a signal that is readily interfaced with portable electronic devices. Traditional solutions suffer from limitations, such as being expensive, bulky, or fragile, or requiring of trained personnel to operate. In addition, many traditional methods of sensing require physical contact of the device with the sensing element/material via wires or solid-state circuitry to acquire data.
Food and drug safety are recognized as a global priority that need emerging technologies to improve. The implement of new sensing technologies for monitoring the quality of food and drugs along the supply chain has the prospects to create improvements. See, Yam, K. L.; Lee, D. S. Emerging Food Packaging Technologies: Principles and Practice; Woodhead Publishing: 2012, and Akala, E. O. Effect of Packaging on Stability of Drugs and Drug Products, in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Handbook: Regulations and Quality (ed S. C. Gad); John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: 2008, each of which is incorporated by reference in its entirety. This need is especially acute for perishable products such as fruit, meat, wine, as well as air- and/or moisture-sensitive pharmaceuticals.